Paola Corti, Open Education Community Manager at SPARC Europe and Project Manager for METID at Politecnico di Milano, will share how her work is breaking barriers in the Open Education Movement by harnessing an international network of librarians. Paola will present her keynote, titled "Opening Knowledge: A Natural Approach," exploring the practice of lifelong learning and its impact on both students and teachers. She will also share tools to discuss the concept of openness, including the ENOEL Playing Cards and related gameplays.
Virginia Clinton-Lisell is Associate Professor of Education, Health, and Behavior with the College of Education & Human Development at the University of North Dakota and Primary Researcher for the Open Education Research Fellowship. She holds a master's degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from New York University and a doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota. Virginia will present her keynote, titled "The Inaccessibility of Access Codes: Student Experiences with Online Homework Systems," sharing findings from a survey of almost a thousand college students about the costs of homework access codes and their impact on student finances, grades, and stress levels.
Charlene Martoni is Librarian for the Behavioral Sciences and Open Knowledge at Georgia State University. In 2023, Charlene and her colleague, Mary Ann Cullen, hosted Georgia State University's first symposium focusing on open and affordable education. Now in its third year, the Open for Student Success Symposium is coordinated by Charlene and a team of librarians whom you will meet throughout the day. Charlene's work is centered on supporting student success in its many forms, from educational affordability to information literacy. Prior to her role at Georgia State University, Charlene worked in academic libraries in the State University of New York System.
This keynote will illuminate the ways in which nature and art can inspire us to re-learn how to share knowledge openly by default. Paola will explore how education exists as a public good and how a practice of lifelong learning can support both students and educators. She will also share tools to discuss the concept of openness, including the ENOEL Playing Cards and related gameplays.
Paola Corti is the Open Education Community Manager at SPARC Europe and Project Manager for METID at Politecnico di Milano. Paola’s work is breaking barriers in the Open Education Movement by harnessing an international network of librarians.
Students are frequently required to purchase access codes to complete homework, but it is not well known how this affects them. This keynote will share findings from a survey of almost a thousand college students about the costs of homework access codes and their impact on student finances, grades, and stress levels. In addition, student respondents shared what they found to be useful about online homework systems. Listeners will consider how the open education field could use these student experiences to inform the development of open homework systems.
Dr. Virginia Clinton-Lisell is Associate Professor of Education, Health, and Behavior with the College of Education & Human Development at the University of North Dakota and Primary Researcher for the Open Education Research Fellowship. She holds a Master's from New York University in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and a Doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota.
New Technologies Adaptation & Authorship Library Services
As research across disciplines becomes more data focused and courses more research intensive, librarians are seeing incredible demand from undergraduate and graduate students for coding and data science training, including data visualization and analysis tools. Instruction on these tools, such as R and Python, are often not provided outside of computer science departments. The global Carpentries community provides a rich and vast infrastructure of open educational resources to support coding and data science. This talk will cover the opportunities for creating OERs through the Carpentries community as well as tailoring the open lessons for library-hosted workshops to support the growing computational needs of students.
Heather Shimon is a Science & Engineering Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she provides research services and instruction in the areas of agricultural and life sciences, as well as environmental studies. Additionally, she is a certified Carpentries Instructor and Research Data Services Consultant. A commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion informs all of her work.
Lisa Abler is a Science & Engineering Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her goal is to help students at all levels better organize, document and store their data. She actively pursues this goal through library instruction and research services, acting as a Research Data Services Consultant, and engagement with the Carpentries community.
Sarah Stevens is the Director of the Data Science Hub at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She became passionate about helping researchers learn and apply data science tools while pursuing her PhD in microbiology. She is an active community member in the Carpentries, as an instructor, trainer, maintainer, lesson developer, member of the Board of Directors, and local community organizer.
Course Transformations Institutional Collaborations
This presentation will address the realities of resource scarcity and the ways in which presenters maintained program quality despite financial and administrative obstacles. Through creative problem-solving and collaboration, they were able to maintain student-centered goals and ensure program stability. By sharing strategies that allowed the program developers to overcome barriers, they will provide a roadmap for educators and administrators to implement impactful programs in the face of reduced resources, ensuring that student outcomes remain a priority.
Brianna Chatmon, MLIS, MBA, is the Instruction and Scholarly Communications Librarian at Marymount University. She specializes in information literacy, open access, and equitable scholarly publishing, leveraging her dual expertise in library science and business administration. With a passion for addressing systemic inequities, Brianna designs impactful instructional programs and leads initiatives supporting academic success and transformative learning. Her extensive experience includes faculty training on copyright, open educational resources, and data visualization.
Angelique Carson is the Shared Collections Librarian at the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC). She holds an MLIS from Louisiana State University. Angelique has held librarian positions at Southern University of New Orleans, the Southern Food and Beverage Culinary Library and Archive, the Catholic University of America, and Howard University. Her greatest professional passion is OER advocacy and how it can meaningfully impact campus community and EDI initiatives in higher education.
Melissa Foge is the Outreach Librarian at The Catholic University of America. She earned her MLS from the University of Maryland and has worked with OER in research and instruction at Catholic University and the University of Maryland Global Campus.
Joel Shields is the Digital Services and Systems Librarian at the Washington Research Library Consortium in Washington, DC. He holds a BA from Maryville College, a Master's in Music from the University of South Carolina, and an MLIS from the University of Alabama. Joel's professional journey includes positions at the University of South Carolina and Georgetown University.
TBD
Adaptation and Authorship Open Textbooks Library Services
In 2022, Gumberg Library at Duquesne University finished designing a three-year-long open education action plan, which included an Open Textbook Writing Fellowship where faculty are provided with assistance needed to create an open textbook for a specific course they teach. As this writing fellowship has successfully launched this academic year, the presenter will share its success and the planning efforts that sparked open textbook authorship on campus. This session will provide an overview of the Open Textbook Writing Fellowship and Gumberg Library's action plan, walk participants through some of the planning methods utilized, and provide planning tools and time during the session for participants to brainstorm and create drafts of plans for their own campuses. Session planning will include creating actionable goals, identifying available resources and partnerships on your campus, and preparing to talk with campus stakeholders.
Arthur Harper (he/they) is the Research and Instructional Design Librarian at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He is a trans, disabled, early-career librarian whose work revolves around teaching first-year college students essential research skills needed for a successful academic career. They also serve as the library's liaison for the engineering departments and for open education initiatives at Duquesne University.
Adaptation and Authorship New Technologies STEM
This session will introduce the audience to the use of Pressbooks for affordable OER authorship of highly interactive materials. The audience will be introduced to digital illustration using Procreate and the use of H5P interactive elements in OER publishing. Presenters will discuss ways to engage undergraduate students in the creation of OER materials, offering unique opportunities for professional development. The session will conclude with a discussion of the impact of these OER materials on student success metrics. Anatomy and Physiology I: An Interactive Histology Atlas was made possible through generous grant funding by the University System of Georgia through the Affordable Learning Georgia initiative.
Dr. Karen Wiles is a medical educator in the Department of Physiology at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University. Dr. Wiles earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Salisbury University and a PhD from Vanderbilt University. She has taught anatomy and physiology at the undergraduate and graduate levels since 2016.
Dr. Christina Wilson is an Assistant Professor at Augusta University. She has taught courses covering topics including general biology, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and neurobiology. Both Dr. Wilson’s graduate and postgraduate research focused on the development of an animal model of schizophrenia.
Dr. Georgios Kallifatidis is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, Augusta University. He earned his MS in Biology from Darmstadt University of Technology (Darmstadt, Germany) and his Ph.D. in cancer research from Ruperto Carola University and the German Cancer Research Center (Heidelberg, Germany). He has taught courses in anatomy, physiology, molecular biology, and introductory biology.
Open Pedagogy Projects Georgia State University
Want to incorporate more data skills into your courses? Or build an experiential research course? In this session, presenters will give you an overview of the open educational resources created for their experiential-learning course, Public Interest Data Literacy (PIDLit) Learning Lab Focused on Tackling Food Insecurity. They will discuss a variety of assignments, lectures, and course projects focused on building students' data skills, and attendees will be given time to plan how they could adopt or adapt a single OER from the Learning Lab or use more of the resources to create their own experiential learning course.
As the Data Literacy and Learning Specialist in the Research Data Services Department at Georgia State University, Ashley Rockwell is focused on building data literacy curricula and programming for undergraduates and faculty teaching undergraduates. For the PIDLit initiative, Ashley and her colleagues taught a two-semester experiential learning course that connected students with community partners and taught students how to apply data skills to address the real-world problem of food insecurity.
Dr. Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh provides administrative leadership and vision for the Georgia State University Library’s Research Data Services (RDS) department. She also supports research and teaching/learning for all departments across campus involving qualitative and quantitative data and digital humanities.
Jason Puckett is Georgia State University's Online Education Librarian, the subject librarian for the Anthropology Department, and a Georgia State University alumnus. Jason specializes in supporting the library's online teaching and learning initiatives. He's an author with research interests in library pedagogy and usability design, and he teaches the bibliographic software Zotero.
Student Voices; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Representation STEM Georgia State University
This student-led presentation aims to empower underrepresented students towards the OER creation process. Influenced by the presenters’ background in STEM, this session will demonstrate how cross-disciplinary collaboration can help drive more enhanced diversity, equity, and inclusion in OER. Through this session, attendees will garner an understanding of why a more inclusive STEM platform is necessary to sustain STEM learning materials and conversations.
Nneka Otuonye is a current undergraduate student at Georgia State University. She studies biology and minors in anthropology, and she is passionate about making a positive impact on the Georgia State community.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Representation Open Textbooks Georgia State University
This presentation shares the findings of a study that employed a critical discourse analysis framework through the lenses of Critical Race Pedagogy and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness (DEI) approach, focusing on the representation of images, language, and culture. The study suggests that textbooks require more nuanced and sophisticated approaches to better reflect the diversity of the learner population, which includes individuals from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The analysis emphasizes the importance of incorporating diversity and intercultural competence as essential components in educational resources. These findings underscore broader implications for foreign language education, advocating for inclusivity and diversity to support the development of global citizenship and intercultural understanding among students. The findings will be published as open-access resources to guide other foreign language studies.
Eunjeong Ahn is a doctoral student in the Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL at Georgia State University. Since entering the PhD program, she has been teaching Korean at all levels and has helped organize various Korean cultural events. She also serves as the Graduate Student Representative for the American Association of Teachers of Korean.
Hakyoon Lee (PhD, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa) is an Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures and the Korean Program Director at Georgia State University where she teaches Korean and researching issues of languages and identities in various social contexts. She is also the Director of the Center for Urban Language Teaching and Research (CULTR). CULTR is one of the Department of Education's Language Resource Centers, supported by Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
New Technologies Georgia State University
Unlike proprietary software, R’s open-source nature allows for continuous innovation and customization by a global community of users and developers. This fosters a collaborative environment where new packages and tools are constantly being developed, contributing to the advancement of statistical computing. R is highly relevant to student success in higher education, particularly for those studying data science, statistics, and related fields. Mastery of R equips students with essential skills for data analysis, visualization, and statistical modeling, which are increasingly in demand in both academia and industry. Furthermore, the open-source nature of R means that students can access and use the software without financial barriers, promoting inclusivity and equal opportunities for learning. As educational institutions increasingly adopt open educational resources, R serves as a prime example of how open-source software can support this movement. By promoting the use of R, Ozlem will underscore the importance of open-source tools in democratizing education, reducing costs, and fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation.
Ozlem Tuncel is a Lecturer and Research Data Services Specialist at Georgia State University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Research Impact
This presentation will examine the interaction between OER, research impact, and student success, offering a different perspective on how faculty members should be incentivized to use, create, and engage with open educational materials. Attendees will learn how this can affect their research impact and visibility, as well as what they can do with that information. Em will explain how students will benefit from increased research impact indirectly by allowing them to take part in more research experiences.
Em Farmer is the Research Impact and Psychology Librarian for Florida Gulf Coast University. She has recently created a workshop series for faculty about research impact and research visibility. She also currently serves as the Chair for the New Members Roundtable for the Georgia Library Association.
Open Pedagogy Projects Library Services Student Voices
Zines (self-published, small-circulation booklets, often created by individuals or small groups to share personal stories, art, and ideas on niche or unconventional topics) serve as platforms for highlighting historically marginalized voices and critical discourse. By embracing zines as a form of open pedagogy, educators may aim to cultivate a learning environment where students not only consume but produce knowledge. Actively participating in the creation of zines is an ideal renewable assignment. Students develop a sense of ownership and agency over their learning process and create learning artifacts to be used by future learners. In this presentation, attendees will learn about zines, renewable assignments, and how they may collaborate with faculty to implement zines as renewable assignments into existing curricula.
Carmen Cole is the Information Sciences and Business Liaison Librarian for the Pennsylvania State University Libraries at University Park. She has published in venues such as the Journal of Academic Librarianship, the ACM Transactions on Computing Education, and portal: Libraries and the Academy. Carmen has presented at several ALA Annual Conferences and Midwinter Meetings, LibLearnX, ACRL, IFLA, the ACM Computer Science Education Technical Symposium, Affordable Learning PA, and OpenEd 2023.
Teacher Education
OER Africa aims to improve African universities’ ability to use open educational resources effectively to support quality teaching and learning so that students succeed academically. The current focus is on continuous professional development (CPD) frameworks for academics and academic librarians in African higher education institutions, with curated OERs for professional development. This presentation will advocate for professional development, share frameworks, and demonstrate how the OER Africa website can be used to navigate and identify OERs for professional development in a structured, intentional manner, to improve student success in higher education through quality teaching and learning.
Ashton is a Programme Specialist with Saide, an NGO based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His major responsibility is to serve as the project manager on the Saide Siyaphumelela Student Success Initiative, where Saide acts as a backbone organization among its partner universities. The Siyaphumelela Student Success Initiative, founded in 2014, is in its third wave, having expanded to 20 out of the 26 public universities in South Africa.
Dr. Tony Lelliott works at Saide, where he is responsible for teacher education. He co-leads the OER Africa initiative and has contributed to several projects at Saide, including OER Africa, the Advanced Diploma for Technical and Vocation Teaching, the National Senior Certificate for Adults, and African Storybook.
Artificial Intelligence
This presentation will recap the process of creating open asynchronous tutorials for artificial intelligence (AI) literacy instruction at a private university in the Northeastern United States. It will begin by discussing the specific institutional perspectives and priorities regarding AI which impacted the topics covered in the tutorials, before describing the strategic decisions made while developing the tutorials. The tutorials seek to address the most essential aspects of AI literacy so that students are thoughtful and informed about their use of AI tools.
Emma Quinn is Assistant Professor and Learning and Curricular Services Librarian at St. John’s University. Her research interests lie in equitable and inclusive information literacy instruction and the history of gender and sexuality in the Irish diaspora.
Open Pedagogy Projects Student Voices
This session will illustrate the potential use of an open syllabus as a form of open pedagogy in an undergraduate classroom. It will showcase how the presenters leveraged OER sources and an open syllabus to encourage active student engagement in a course focused on developing an undergraduate research proposal by students without prior research experience. This course was fully co-designed and co-taught by a librarian and an instructor.
Dr. Andjela H.Kaur, PhD, CRC, CVE, is an Assistant Teaching Professor in biobehavioral health and rehabilitation and human services at Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley. Her research includes political economy of disability and globalization and disability. Andjela is an advocate for disability justice and health equity.
Jen Jarson is the Head Librarian at Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley and the Interim Head Librarian at Pennsylvania State University, Schuylkill. Her research interests include information literacy teaching and learning, undergraduate research, and peer-to-peer learning.
Aneasha Dale is a senior at Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley, where she studies rehabilitation and human services. After she graduates this spring, she will be joining a doctoral program in physical therapy. Aneasha is an enthusiastic reader and an accomplished cheer leader.
An annual celebration, Open Education Week (OE Week) is an opportunity for actively sharing and learning about the latest achievements in Open Education worldwide.
Open Education Week was launched in 2012 by Open Education Global as a collaborative, community-built open forum. Every year OE Week raises awareness and highlights innovative open education successes worldwide. OE Week provides practitioners, educators, and students with an opportunity to build a greater understanding of open educational practices and be inspired by the wonderful work being developed by the community around the world.
Interested in sponsoring the symposium in any way? Contact Librarian Charlene at cmartoni@gsu.edu.
Contact Librarian Charlene at cmartoni@gsu.edu.
Georgia State University was accepted as one of 50 schools to participate in the 2022-23 OpenStax Institutional Partnership Program.This program provides a learning community, free coaching, and strategic planning to help schools advance initiatives toward open education.
Georgia State University Librarians Mary Ann Cullen and Charlene Martoni were appointed to represent the university during this year of professional development, networking, and collaboration. As a result of this experience, GSU Library hosted its inaugural Open for Student Success Symposium. The gathering produced a collection of educational recordings accessible to GSU students and faculty.
GSU Library was invited to participate in the OpenStax Institutional Partnership Program again for the 2023-24 academic year to provide feedback and mentor new member institutions. This year, Librarians Charlene Martoni and Jason Puckett opened the invitation to participate in the Open for Student Student Success Symposium to all curious about OER in higher education. With permission from all presenters, GSU Library produced another collection of recordings that are open to all as OERs under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComerical-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
